Aggressive Apathy: The Problem of Fatalism

Greetings all!

This post comes as the first of 2013 for my blog, which has finally achieved the URL and name change I desired. While the actual name we have is temporary, the URL is final, and reflects who I am on this site best. This post will be short, but addresses an important point of politics I’ve noticed fairly often these days: apathy. People seem to have given up on politics and on governments in general, saying there is no use trying or arguing because nothing can be changed. This is a dangerous trend in my eyes.

At the core of the issue is fatalism. Many have decided that because there is so much to fight against, that no fight can ever be successful. That because societal norms haven’t changed yet, there is no use pursuing that change. This is exemplified by the people that say all politicians are corrupt, that all political parties are awful. People who denounce politics in general as a dirty business and decide to stay out of the entire process because of the negative blanket they lay over such subjects.

Initially, this would not seem like such a big problem. If some people want to opt out of it all in disgust, why make them stay, right? The problem is not when a few people do this; the problem emerges when this belief of absolute corruption and negativity spreads far enough to convince significant amounts of people to just give up on things. At that point, fewer people care to educate themselves or to participate in democracy, and the fewer participants a republic has the less success it will reap.

But how to argue against this attitude? Other than noting how inherently lazy it is, there are few ways to convince someone with such a belief set that it is worth becoming reinvested. However, there are a few things that can be said for having a little faith in government, politicians, and politics in general.

First, not all politicians are corrupt. This is such an easy thing to see. If it were true, we would be in an even greater mess than we are today. So would the rest of the planet; I seriously doubt we’d be in anything but a severe depression if all politicians were out for money and power. If entire governments were devoting themselves to such pesky inner squabbles, we would have absolutely nothing to show for ourselves in the way of progress. It can be argued that some politicians are indeed corrupt; this is obvious, and it will always inevitably occur. But deciding that because some are corrupt we should quit is just pathetic.

Second, many people seem to have lost faith in governments in general. I have encountered some that say all governments on Earth right now are corrupt and inefficient structurally, and that fighting systems so laden down already is pointless. The problem with this is that, even if it were true, giving up would mean agreeing with the corrupt systems. By rolling over and allowing such evils, these people accede to exactly that which they abhor. Any person who declares all governments corrupt or something along those lines therefore must fight against it; otherwise, they are being hypocrites in the most passive way possible. However, in the end, not all governments are corrupt in the same way that not all politicians are corrupt. Once again, if this were true, it would be more than apparent in our societies and economies by now.

The last point is the most important one, and that is the point of being apathetic politically. I have heard people say that all political viewpoints are awful, that political debate is poisonous, and that there is no point in challenging the status quo. This was exemplified when a friend of mine debated religion with me, and we got into why bad things happen to good people. He, being religious, suggested that because we cannot change god’s will there is no point in trying to change the way things are. He stated that tragedies will occur, and the best thing we can learn to do is accept them and move on with our lives. And while this philosophy is good within reason, it can be extended too far. We should be able to accept that sometimes houses will catch on fire for no good reason and people will die. We should learn to mourn the loss in these families, and then move on from things like this.

Yet we must be willing to try to change the things we have the power to change. If gender inequality persists, we must be willing to fight for the equal rights and treatment of both genders, even if it seems like societal barriers have been set up all around us. If educational inequality persists, we must be willing to make tertiary schooling easily accessible for those that deserve it rather than just those that can afford it. If economic inequality persists, we must be willing to do more to ensure that those getting the short end of the stick can make do while those with more give up a little to make things more tolerable for the rest of us. There are many things we can change if we put some effort into it; we can’t give in. We can’t stop fighting because we’re surrounded. Never lay down your principles; you lose the instant you do. As long as we fight, we don’t lose until we die.

That is all for this week, and all of my old contact sites are still intact. I encourage commenting here, or you can send emails to me at zerospintop@live.com. My Facebook, Google+, Twitter, DeviantArt, and Steam profiles are all also available for contact if necessary. Good night, and this is KnoFear, signing off. 

In Deep Water: The American Fiscal Cliff

Greetings all!

This post marks a special moment for my blog; this is my 50^th post. I’m glad to see it has come so far since the beginning. This week, I expand upon the topic of the American fiscal cliff, which seems to be the only thing being spoken about in political spheres here these days. I will explain the situation at hand in the easiest terms I can manage, and offer my solution to our looming problem. This week’s quote comes from Friedrich Engels, a man who helped to write the Communist Manifesto and was very much a founder of organized communist ideology alongside Karl Marx.

Onto the topic at hand, the fiscal cliff is not something to be taken lightly. Unfortunately, the most people seem to understand is that Congress and the president are not acting fast enough to solve the issue. While this is true, it ignores the situation at hand. The “fiscal cliff,” in itself, is actually not too hard to sum up. It is a series of drastic spending cuts and tax increases that will take effect in the new year if Congress and the president do not act quickly enough. However, it is not quite so simple as to be explained in one sentence. For those that would like an easy way to look at this through a graphic form, I direct you to the Washington Post, which published a fairly good tool for finding information about the topic. For those that haven’t picked it up by now, the fiscal cliff is very serious for America. If we go over the cliff, we risk taking on the same pattern of suffering that austerity-laden European nations have fallen in to.

This is mostly because the fiscal cliff is, itself, an austerity package. By combining spending cuts and tax increases on everyone, we will be signing off on a renewed recession. Austerity has been proven as a harmful measure for European countries; we are sure to have troubles if we take on the same policies. First come the cuts; drastic in size, these cuts will very much reduce the burden of American domestic spending. However, the cost is impressive. The defense cuts alone are draconian; even I don’t know if our military could handle it. A large chunk of American jobs depend on the military, and likely won’t survive these cuts. I have long been a critic of American militarism and heightened spending on our defense. And while I would like to see cuts over time, this is too much too quickly. I am not defending our horrid foreign policies; I am defending our domestic employment. Cutting this amount of funding and jobs all at once will leave many people unemployed. It gets even worse when you realize that unemployment benefits are being cut as well, so these newly jobless military workers won’t have much to rely on. Pile that onto an economy sure to be shrinking and we’re looking at a significant amount of people who won’t have jobs for a long time. We should be cutting the military down over time; we need to encourage our government to tear away the military-industrial complex and get rid of our hostile, activist foreign policy. Yet this is not the way it should be done. We should not change this at a huge cost to ourselves.

And these defense cuts are not the only ones planned to take effect. There are sweeping cuts set to take place across most all government agencies, severely damaging public sector jobs where wages have already been stagnant for years. Significant damages will come in the form of cuts to public benefits, such as unemployment and Medicare/Medicaid. The American right has long pressed for cuts to entitlements, but even modern Republicans claim the fiscal cliff must be avoided. When we see this occurring, we should realize how bad things are likely to get. While we will not experience a major recession the likes of which some nations have faced, we will experience a sharp drop in GDP that our populace is not ready for.

However, the real stabs in the back from the fiscal cliff are the tax increases. Strictly speaking, taxes are not truly being raised in many forms by the cliff. Many tax cuts of the past will be expiring, thereby raising overall rates for all Americans in the process. First, the payroll tax cut will expire. This one will be quite the harsh punishment; the payroll tax cut affects all Americans earning a wage, and it isn’t by a small amount. I’d like to see this cut expire for the top wage earners and eventually all wage earners; it shouldn't have existed in the first place. However, letting it go for absolutely everyone at the same time ensures a detrimental effect on the amount common people are paying. Even the lowest wage earners will pay an extra $120 on their annual taxes; this seems like little, but to those under the poverty line it is sharp and unbearable. The expiration of cuts from the 2009 stimulus package will also overwhelmingly harm the lowest wage earners. The largest percentage of their new payments will come from these cuts, unsurprisingly. The expiration of tax cuts and limits on the estate tax will push holes deeper into most all Americans pockets, especially the top wage earners. And then come the expiration of tax extenders and the alternative minimum tax patch, both of which will sting businesses significantly. The last taxes come from the new healthcare laws, of which are not much concern except to the highest wage earners. Combined, these expirations of cuts will have a drastic and destabilizing effect on all Americans. This will be especially bad for those lower and middle class workers that lose their jobs, as a recession economy with few unemployment benefits is not the best place to look for work.

And now, we come to answer the question: what to do? There are a few options at our disposal. The first would be to just go over the cliff, and deal with the economic crap fest we are sure to endure. It would certainly be damaging to our economy; we would be plunged into uncertainty, our joblessness would jump high, and it would mean another recovery would be necessary once more. However, in the end, the deficit would be reduced by huge amounts, solving our so-called debt problems fairly efficiently. Let me state this now: we cannot allow this to happen. A government is not meant to run like a business; debts and deficits should be expected at some points, as they are necessary to keep the country running on business as usual. Without public spending, our country does not have much to go on, and we are already part of a culture where cutting jobs for a quick buck is common. If we allow ourselves on this path, we only contribute to the inequality America has become well known for. Let’s not make ourselves even less equal if we’re given the chance.

The second option would be a grand compromise. It’s a big stretch, but if Congress and the president can work out a large deal which covers how we are to cut spending and raise taxes evenly, we can avoid the cliff. While this would be great, I urge you not to get your hopes up. Our legislative branch has proven to be quite dysfunctional these past years; don’t think that will change because of a crisis. Oh, I’m certain that some work is being done. But I seriously doubt we’ll have something perfect by the time the bell tolls on our economy.

The final option would be some form of imperfect compromise, where either the left or the right gets a larger share of what it wants in order to stave off fiscal disaster. If the right gets what it wants, much of our deficit reduction will come from spending cuts that very much target low and middle income Americans at the expense of America’s wealthiest citizens. If the left gets what it wants, the richest Americans will be taxed somewhat more strongly in order to pay down the deficit. However, either way this happens the side that loses out will still get some of what it desires. The right will get some cuts to domestic spending no matter what; the Democratic Party has shown to be far too willing to negotiate on this for us to expect otherwise. The left will get some tax raises on the wealthy no matter what as well; the Republican Party may be stubborn, but in the end they can’t risk a new recession just for some bogus principles.

My hope is that the majority of our deficit reduction comes in the form of tax increases on the wealthy, while cuts are left as small by comparison. My reasoning why is quite obvious; I’m a communist for a reason. The wealthy have more money to give without suffering. This is fact. Therefore, we must ask that they give more to stabilize our economy. They may gripe about losing money they could invest, but the reality is that those taxes are used for public investments. And when taxes are raised, higher wage-earners are incentivized to hire more workers and increase business in order to make up for the tax shortfall on income. I would hope that anyone can see my logic behind this.

That is all for this week, and as always I encourage constructive comments right here on the site. I am also available for contact at my email (zerospintop@live.com), as well as my Facebook, Twitter, DeviantArt, and Steam accounts. I’d like to one last time remind everyone that, the next time I post something here, the URL will have been changed and the blog name will also be changed. This is just a warning to readers; if you’d like to find this site in the future, it will be found by searching for my new name, KnoFear. I’d like to also introduce a co-author on the site, popov89. He is a good friend of mine, and likely will contribute his own work to this site in due time. Good night, and this is KnoFear, signing off. 

The Time to End: Israel and Palestine In A World Of Change

Greetings all!

This post comes after a short hiatus on my part in order to re-charge and plan out changes for this site in the near future. I also took a break to attend to my schoolwork; it’s a necessary thing sometimes, as my education is important. This post concerns the conflict just experienced (and still ongoing) between Israel and Palestine this year. While the violent attacks between the Gaza Strip and Israel have mostly ceased by now, problems are ongoing. With the recognition of Palestine as a non-member state by the United Nations and new settlement plans by Israel in retaliation, the situation has heated up from the relative peace experienced beforehand. My opinions on most of the issues concerning the region have not changed drastically since I last wrote about this, although some points have. And in the end, I’m writing this to make known what must be done to solve these conflicts, and to prevent the atrocious violence we continue to see. This week’s quote comes from Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fatah, the group which controls the West Bank. I support him and Fatah, and found it fitting I include something from him today.

Normally, I would not post if nothing about the situation or my opinions had changed. This is true of what I am writing right now; while my distaste for Hamas remains, I have switched sides on a major point of contention. After much thought, research, and reflection, I now support immediate Palestinian independence. My reasoning for this is due in part to the recent conflict the region experienced. For every rocket shot at Israel, hundreds more fired at the Gaza strip. Very few Israelis died, yet over one hundred Gazans perished, mostly non-combatants. I realize that every death counts, and that every Israeli had friends and family who will weep over their losses. Yet hundreds more will grieve in the Gaza Strip. I realize now how terrible things have become, and how wrong this all was in the first place.

I split my support for Palestine into two portions accordingly; the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Prior to the conflict, I already supported the West Bank. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank was no better than the Syrian occupation of Lebanon; the Palestinians were trapped away from their home, controlled by a government incredibly hostile to themselves. While Israel no longer exerts direct military control over the West Bank, life has not improved at the pace it should have. The West Bank remains under a tight economic leash from Israel and the United States. Infrastructure and education are in poor condition, and poverty is a nearly endemic problem. At the very least, the West Bank has remained under good leadership. Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas remain paragons of secular strength in the West Bank; their leadership has remained confident that negotiation can lead to a two-state solution. These commitments to secularism, democracy, and peace have fostered my support for the Palestinian Authority and Fatah. In a small piece of land constantly threatened by Israeli settlers, Fatah remains a voice of reason. Impressive, for a place where reason is often cast aside.

I have found the Gaza Strip harder to support ever since Hamas took power in the 2006 elections. To me, Hamas had always represented an antagonistic group which ran perpendicular to Fatah. Hamas is a conservative Islamist group, and supports much of the missile strikes on Israel. Just like Israel and the U.S., I always viewed and still do view Hamas as a terrorist group. They do not have any commitment to peace and few ties to democracy, despite what they may say. Hamas has killed and made its own people suffer in order to appear strong and fiercely independent. I have always viewed their priorities as being out of order, and their policies very much wrong. The Islamism of Hamas restricts Gazans significantly, limiting the secular freedoms that Fatah and all governments should provide. Hamas has also driven the economy of the Gaza Strip further into the ground with their confrontational attitude.

However, the position of the Gaza Strip is a desperate one indeed. They are blockaded by Israel and suffer the economic woes of sanctions. Their infrastructure and education are often worse than that of the West Bank. They are plagued by violent Islamism spilling over from the Sinai Peninsula. True, the Israeli military unilaterally disengaged from the Gaza Strip in 2005. But again, the fear of occupation and settlers remains. The fear of strikes by Israel remains. Israel has taken their land before; it is not beyond Israel to do it again. Especially with an ultra-conservative government in power like right now, under Binyamin Netanyahu and the Likud Party. As long as both of these sides retain hostile policies towards each other, the Gaza Strip will suffer more significantly. I might not support Hamas, but I do support Gazans. I cannot tolerate the violence, the death, the hatred that builds between these peoples any longer. I cannot support such blatant, solvable inequality between peoples that both claim a “holy land.” It is not worth it to see such horrors occur.

My final point is as follows: Palestine deserves independence. Not eventually; it must happen as soon as we can make it happen. It must happen now. Israel must agree to stop all settlements and take Israelis off of Palestinian land. In return, Palestinians must stop firing rockets at and sending suicide bombers into Israel. This is not difficult, and these conditions are not unreasonable. If Israel can afford to build Palestinian settlements, it can afford to build homes in Israel for those uprooted by the removal of settlements. The only thing really stopping Palestinians from ending the use of weaponry is Hamas and other militant extremist tendencies. When elections come, replace Hamas with Fatah and the clear-headed leadership of the Palestinian Authority. Hamas has proven to be one of the worst things for the Gaza Strip yet. I can see no reason they shouldn't be kicked out of office. With two states in place, there will no longer be a need to fight. It can all end now. It is up to Israel and Palestine. We must make this right.

That is all for this week, and I am still available for contact through the comments. I can also be reached through my email at zerospintop@live.com, my Facebook, Twitter, DeviantArt, Steam, and Tumblr. However, from now on I will not be using my Google+ for contact. My Gmail usage has become split between three accounts, and is now too hectic for these kinds of things. Two announcements before I go; this site’s URL and name will still be switched at the beginning of 2013. Remember, I will be using the name KnoFear from now on. Also, I am now searching for a co-author here. I will only be accepting a co-author through DeviantArt, and I will be asking my friends first, so don’t expect a position unless all else falls through. The new author will likely be helping with moderating the blog and may even be posting his/her own work. However, there will be more on that later.

For now, this is KnoFear, signing off. 

Means to an End: Socialist v. Democratic Revolutions

Greetings all!

This post comes the weekend after the United States election, in which president Barack Obama was re-elected by a comfortable electoral margin. Many state ballot measures were also voted on, giving various failures and successes to both liberal and conservative movements in America. In good news, gay marriage laws have been approved in Maine and Maryland, while a Minnesota ban was removed. Colorado and Washington legalized recreational marijuana use for those of age, and Massachusetts now allows weed for medicinal purposes. A ballot measure in Florida against Obamacare failed, while similar measures in Alabama, Wyoming, Montana, and Missouri passed. However, these measures against the health-insurance mandate are mostly moot, seeing as the Supreme Court ruled that the law is legal and therefore goes over the heads of state laws. However, this post concerns a topic of much more direct interest to communists, socialists, and the like. Today, I will be arguing the merits and pitfalls of both socialist and democratic revolutions for the purpose of communism. The question of which type of revolution to pursue has been one that plagues us on the left constantly, and here I intend to see what I can make of it. This week’s quote comes from Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected Marxist leader in Latin America, who gave a farewell speech not long before the coup against him.

Before I dive head first into the high and low points of socialist and democratic revolutions, they first must be defined, even within somewhat loose terms. The socialist revolution is often the one non-communists imagine when they think of a communist rebellion in their country. While a socialist revolution does not have to fit this imagery, it tends to lean in this direction. The path of a socialist revolution is often more likely to be violent, as it involves the complete and immediate takeover of the means of production by the workers. It involves the overthrow of bourgeois society and economic norms, creating a socialist state wherein the proletariat is placed in power. In some communist ideologies, this revolution is planned and led by a vanguard party which serves to direct the new socialist state through and after the revolution until true communism is achieved. If I must simplify it down to a point, this is the type of revolution where one is most likely to find the streets running red with the blood of the bourgeoisie. The best example I can present of a socialist revolution in history is one of the most well-known historical revolutions: the Russian Revolution. Specifically, I speak of the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks achieved power from the provisional government left in the wake of Tsar Nicholas II. This revolution is well-known; the Bolsheviks took power and began the first communist leadership structure that had staying power on a national scale. Eventually, once the Whites had been conquered by the Reds, the Soviet Union would come to be. This exemplifies the socialist revolution well, in that the overall speed with which the communist goals were achieved was quick, and the disestablishment of the former state occurred in a similar fashion. There was violence between the communist and anti-communist forces, and the consequences of such a revolution are more than apparent through history. However, the revolution was successful.

The democratic revolution is inherently a different means of achieving the end result, a communist state, of course with the same dream of the penultimate and perfect state resulting from such efforts. The democratic revolution takes a divergent path towards this goal, in that it cannot occur without major popular support. The democratic type requires that the populace of a nation desire a significant change of governance towards socialism/communism, and as such a revolution takes place. The idea of a democratic revolution is that the people are wise enough to choose communism for themselves, rather than requiring a socialist revolution to take place first. The people choose to rise up on their own, and they choose to abolish the old bourgeois state. The key of democratic revolution is just that; mass democracy. The hope is that people will learn what is best for them, and because of this they will make the choice of communism to better themselves. However, this type of revolution typically receives less belief and support among communists, often due to perceived problems with its mechanics. I will note these in the coming paragraphs. For this type, I select the Chilean election of 1970, in which a Marxist candidate, notably Salvador Allende, received a plurality and therefore a victory. While not necessarily a true democratic revolution, it is the closest example I can pull out at this time. The Chilean people selected a communist presidency, therefore choosing to remove the shackles of capitalism in their nation. While perhaps not a revolution, this is the closest I believe we’ve ever come to such a phenomenon.

And now, we come to the benefits and drawbacks to both socialist and democratic revolutions. Obviously on the former end, violence is an immediate drawback. A socialist revolution inherently has a tendency to draw bloodshed due to the immediacy with which the change is fostered, and often causes fighting or even war due to resistance by the bourgeois state and its military forces. Sometimes, the people of a nation will be scared or unprepared for such a revolution, and will willingly attempt to counter it with violence. Because a socialist revolution is not the kind of thing that can draw back and hope for better times to rebel, it is not uncommon for violence to be a result of it. Look at many of our historic socialist revolutions, and violence took place; Russia, China, Cuba, etc. Death and suffering occurred in all of these places, and was very much unavoidable given the circumstances. Socialist revolutions can also lead to much popular unrest, as chances are the majority of the population may not support a new regime in such a manner. This can lead to further war and can even lead to an overthrow of the new socialist regime, impairing progress. Meanwhile, a democratic revolution has an opposite set of issues. While much more likely to be successful as an end result, democratic revolutions have much more trouble occurring in the first place. They require an educated and willing populace, which is a wholly uncommon situation. A democratic revolution also requires that the military of the state be either sided with the communists or be unable to stop the revolution. If the state can simply shoot down its opposition, chances are it will. Because a democratic revolution is meant to be nonviolent, it would only hurt popular viewpoints of the revolution for its supporters to carry weaponry. The democratic revolution also leaves open a hole in that it sets no particular function in place to rule a nation after the revolution ends. Socialist revolutions tend towards support of a vanguard party; while a democratic revolution can do the same, those that support democratic revolutions are less likely to suggest a vanguard party. I know I wouldn’t be the first to point out a vanguard option when there are other means of governance.

Now, we come to the good sides of each revolutionary model. The socialist revolution, in its immediacy and potency, is considerably more viable and quicker than a democratic revolution. While a socialist revolution very well may draw bloodshed out of its opponents, it is through this will to fight that the revolution is made easier to prepare for. While most leftists would prefer to see less death in the wake of progress, those willing to see it occur will inevitably have a heavier hand in revolutions. Because the socialist revolution is more strong-willed and backed with power, it can often be achieved whether the state is willing to fight or not. One thing I hear from communists hoping for socialist revolution often is this: “Better to have guns and not need them, than to need them and not have them.” This is something reflected in the words of Che Guevara, a great communist revolutionary, who once said something along these lines. “A revolution without guns? It would never work.”

Meanwhile, the democratic model presents multiple benefits as well. A democratic revolution presents significant opportunity for a peaceful transition to communism instead of a violent one where people suffer and die, where families are broken. A democratic revolution also promises a significantly higher chance of staying power; with the majority of the populace supporting the new regime, coup d’états are wildly less likely to occur. With popular support also comes the opportunity to resist international influences on the revolution, along with the opportunity to move quickly on governmental reform. Popular support also ensures a level of stability to a new communist state that a socialist revolution may not be able to provide. I personally would much rather see a democratic revolution take place due to my opposition to violent means to any end. If I were to support a violent socialist revolution, I would risk becoming a hypocrite of my own words. If I am to criticize America for supporting violent capitalism, I generally see it as wrong for myself to support violent socialism, except when absolutely necessary.

That is all for this week, and once again I’ll be noting the upcoming changes to this blog. The URL and name of this blog will be changing at the beginning of the next year to reflect my name change to KnoFear. As I said last week, this is inevitable. As always, I am available for contact through zerospintop@live.com, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, DeviantArt, Steam, and Tumblr. Good night, and this is KnoFear, signing off.  

The Great Lie: Failure of Free-Market Capitalism

Greetings all!

This post comes amid a hectic flurry for me. Last weekend, there was no post due to fears during Hurricane Sandy and strong amounts of schoolwork as my first quarter came to a close. I had originally intended to post this topic then, and then to finish October properly this weekend. However, I scrapped those plans in view of the special time with which I am posting in. Tomorrow is the presidential election date for America, and much of our future is determined tomorrow. Because of this, I felt it proper to close October in a less traditional style for this blog, and instead of doing two posts do just one. While tomorrow we decide whether we want a liberal in power or a conservative, we shall still decide within the boundaries of capitalism. Here, I intend to show a portion of why capitalism itself is a poor choice to make. This week’s quote comes from Noam Chomsky, a leftist critic of many years whom I admire.

Moving on, this post is not made to argue strictly for communism. I will solely argue against capitalism, however this will be done through a leftist vein. The main point of this post is to focus on the greatest lie capitalist societies teach us. That we can do whatever we want to if we work hard; that we can become anything we desire. Capitalism says that we can get filthily rich if we try, and that we all have an equal chance in capitalist society. This is wildly untrue. So much of your success is not determined by effort, but by wealth and connections. If you are born with rich parents, your chances of success are increased exponentially. You have access to better schools, a childhood not plagued by monetary problems, and connections in industry that the poor can only dream of. The top 1% is just that; one percent of our population. Capitalists may say that with 308 million people in America, 1% is still a large amount of people. Relatively speaking, it isn’t. Especially when you realize just how much worse the wealth gap is here, and elsewhere in the world. Because capitalism lies to us in this way, it is not worth the trouble of its existence. We would prosper much faster and in a more equal way without it; capitalism is a system of the past now. It is time to take the next step.

And now, we move on to my supplementary arguments. First, I’d like to note that capitalism inherently takes away from mass democracy and economic rights. This is mostly done through multinational corporations and their leaders. Look at the election; oil corporations and big banks have all but bought our president for us. Through political ads and direct threats to their employees, this campaign has been very much tainted by the business of voting. That is what this democracy has very much become; a system where even the government is a business. No government should function that way. A corporation or business has a duty to protect its CEOs and shareholders first; employees and customers be damned. That corporation or business must operate on a strict budget or be destroyed. And if it is destroyed, most businesses give huge going-away presents to their CEOs and nothing to the common worker. Does this sound ideal for a country? A country has its first duty to its citizens. A country must work not to better the lives of its legislators, but to better the lives of all. A country must defend its people, and a deficit is not of huge concern to a country because government should not be out to profit. That is the job of the private sector, not the public. A government should not foster wealth inequality; nothing should. The job of government is to ensure that the people are not starving on the streets without money for food.

My next point centers on exploitation. Let’s take an example in the form of a common factory worker. At the beginning, this worker had hopes and dreams. As a child, he or she likely wished to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a famous movie star. However, because they did not have wealth as a child and were not extraordinarily smart, they were not able to achieve the education they needed. Without college or connections, they were forced into blue-collar labor at a factory, where they make a measly salary for harsh work without many benefits. If the corporation that owns the factory gets enough profits, it willingly downsizes its workforce to cut away the payment of salaries and benefits it no longer desires. The worker is now unemployed, suffering every day, and there’s a good chance he’ll become homeless. And as an employee, he was not much better off. His product was not what he created in that factory, but rather it was his labor. He was selling his physical energy just to sustain himself in society. In this way, he prostituted himself to the bourgeoisie just to survive. While not a slave in the traditional sense of the word, he is not free. And he is not the only one. Countless people in America and worldwide suffer in the same way as this worker drone, and it is the fault of capitalism that such exploitation occurs. It’s disgusting as it is, and was only worse for people during the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, much of the developing world still suffers in the way laborers suffered in newly industrial Britain and Japan. Because we have other options which do not exploit workers in the same fashion, we have a duty to remove capitalism. It is in humanity’s own interest to prevent exploitation and suffering; this is simple evolutionary fact. We must protect and provide for our race because we have the ability to do so. Capitalism is no longer necessary for that, so it must be removed.

Third, capitalism inevitably fosters imperialism and therefore suffering in one way or another. Initially, this was very easy to see and most historians agree on it. At the inception of capitalism as a global force and throughout the Industrial Revolution, the empires in Europe and Japan spread their influence over the world. This drove the populace of colonized areas into deep submissive poverty, forcing them to produce raw goods and purchase high-priced finished products. Entire native populations were literally enslaved and subjugated to do this, causing global suffering on unprecedented scales. People were beaten and killed, all while comparatively nothing was done for the greater good of humanity. Capitalists may say that the progress in technology, medicine, etc. makes up for this suffering, especially in light of the fact that it does not exist as much today. However, this is not even true. Slavery does still exist today, and it very much is just as bad as the past. Even though those technological breakthroughs have occurred and education has become better, these things do not occur because of capitalism. I’m certain if you ask the creators of great vaccines, the creators of great innovations, that they will not tell you they did these things solely for money. Take Dr. Jonas Salk for example; he created the vaccine for polio. He didn’t do it for the profit; that wasn’t even on his mind. He wanted to help cure a deadly disease for mankind’s greater good, and this is why he claimed no patent on his vaccine. Instead, he preferred it given away to people as much as it could. He wanted to help remove a deadly disease, not make money. Even as he aged, he didn’t look for profit; instead, he tried to find a cure for AIDS. My point is as follows. Capitalism is not responsible for these advances; people are responsible for these advances. The good nature of some human hearts is enough to cause progress, with or without capitalism in place. Therefore, because capitalism hurts people along the way, it is not worth its existence and omnipresence. It should be removed. Don’t worry; progress can very much happen without it.

My next point concerns market failure and instability. Market failure is often described as the failure of capitalist society to produce enough quality goods and services for all people. Market instability is the tendency for capitalist nations to experience periods of growth, followed by recession and suffering. Even in these periods of decline, the rich rarely suffer at all. In fact, they are often responsible for this decline and sometimes benefit from it disproportionately. Market failure on the other hand is best shown through the case of India. In India, hundreds of millions of people are starving, and yet the country is a big food exporter. Shouldn't India feed its own suffering masses before the well-to-do in other nations? I rest my case on this issue.

And now, we come to the last two points I wish to make, notably sustainability and inefficiency. As a system, capitalism not only exploits workers, but it also exploits our planet. Through industrialization and negligence, our Earth has become wildly polluted. Many species have gone extinct, and humanity increasingly finds itself presented with the dangers of a warmer world. The evidence is overwhelming; the Earth has warmed considerably in recent years, and our pace is not slowing sufficiently. The danger of this is obvious; storms will increase in strength and number while general sustainability of the planet will decline with pollution. We cannot live in a world which becomes a desert without much produce. Humanity is growing; we need more food, and a healthier environment if we wish to avoid mass starvation and disease. On the issue of inefficiency, this is clear in many common households of America. We have recycling bins, but most of us don’t use them as much as we should and often use them improperly. We are a very lazy people; there’s a reason we rarely have voter turnout beyond fifty percent. We’re also a very obese people, not just due to genetics and the availability of fast food, but because we’re often too lazy to change small things in our diets. This inefficiency and waste is promoted by capitalism; how many commercials do you see promoting vegetables as compared to those promoting McDonald’s? The ratio is ridiculous, especially because the number of commercials for legitimately healthy foods is almost zero.

That is about it for now, even though I didn’t cover some topics in full, including property and inequality. But you probably know my views on that already if you’re a regular reader. I’d also like to announce something here as well. At the beginning of the next year, this site will undergo two critical changes. First, the name of this site will be changed. My name on this site is no longer “SuperJew McLovin,” so the URL will be switched to KnoFear. The usual blogspot.com will follow, of course. KnoFear reflects more of who I am and is my universal name on many sites, so I’ll be using it instead. The name of the blog will be switched from “A Nerd’s Life” as well. This blog no longer reflects my original intentions of being a daily blog about my life, but instead reflects my political beliefs. As such, the name will likely be changed to some awful pun about communism or something like that. This message will be repeated at each blog post until then to remind all of you about the impending changes. I hope I won’t lose any of my readers with this change, and such is why I will say this message over and over again. I wish to avoid confusion. And now good night, and this is KnoFear signing off. Remember to vote!

Right v. Privilege: The Cost of Higher Education

Greetings all!

This post concerns an issue which affects me personally, and which I likely will become even more invested in during the coming months. This issue is that of the costs surrounding the pursuit of a higher education in the United States of America. We know they are significantly high; what matters is why, and what we can do to change that. This week’s quote comes from Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont who has described himself as a democratic socialist, the only one in over six decades. I typically find more ground with him than most politicians in America these days.

The cost of an undergraduate education has been rising for decades, and has only been rising more sharply in the past few years. We can already see that the average cost of education at a public university is over 13,000 dollars each year, while the cost of attending a private college is more than double that price at over 32,000 dollars each year. This does not even factor in costs beyond tuition, room and board. Students often purchase fairly expensive meal plans at college, and must put in large sums of cash to get textbooks each semester. There are bountiful ways for a college or university to charge more money for a student to attend, and these costs will only be compounded further as time passes if we do nothing.

If certain conditions were met, these rising costs would not matter. If average GDP per capita and household wealth had been rising alongside average American salaries, these numbers would not matter nearly as much. If the ratio between financial aid and loans for education had not been increasing so rapidly or had been decreasing to a more stable level, these rising costs would mean even less. If these conditions were met, every average American family could afford to send their children to most every school without having to suffer enormous financial hardship, or put that hardship on the shoulders of their kids. However, none of these conditions have been met in recent years.

Unfortunately, the average American GDP per capita (PPP) is about 49,000 dollars, and this number swings on a pendulum quite immediately in differing regions. The median household income is about 50,000 dollars, an 8 percent drop since 2007. The American per capita personal income is about 40,000 dollars. This too varies by state, with Mississippi having the lowest median personal income of about 31,000 dollars. The average cost of living in the United States has only been rising in the past years, to about 27,000 dollars each year, and that cost cuts out the possible costs of marriage/divorce, college/student loans, credit debt, and retirement all together. If all the possible yearly costs are averaged properly and added together, the total comes to about 40,000 dollars. That’s quite a bit of cash for a man or woman who doesn’t own their home permanently, has never married or divorced and is not raising a family of any kind. This is especially frightening, to know that the cost of living and median personal income are at about the exact same cost. That means a person making 40,000 dollars a year cannot spend anything on luxuries if they fulfill the average costs of necessities. This situation is especially scary for those people making the minimum wage, set at 7 dollars and 25 cents per hour. At an average of 2080 hours of work for any American per year, these people make about 15,000 dollars each year. This is far less than the average cost of living, even when many of the pieces of that cost are cut away. These people will have to skimp on many essentials, like food, just to survive in America today, let alone afford college for themselves or their children. The worst thing among them all is the amount of financial aid being given to students on average: just 12,000 dollars. Not particularly frightening for public university students until you realize the majority of that is made up in the form of student or parent loans, whose costs will rise and compound exponentially each year. Just imagine how much worse that is for private university students and parents.

By now, I’ve established that the costs of college versus how much Americans can afford are far too high. In fact, it’s plain absurd how bad it can get; some university tuition costs alone are more than entire household incomes each year. How are students expected to be able to pay these amounts without wallowing in unmanageable debt? The answer, in many cases, is that they are not. The goal of most private universities is to pull a profit, so if a student can’t pay their debt for a long time the college will continually collect more and more money from them through interest, fees, and penalties. Meanwhile, fresh-out-of-college employment rates and average salaries are even lower than the national total averages, and this has persisted for years. All of this equates to students and parents suffering for years on end just to achieve an education through undergraduate school. This can become doubly worse for those pursuing graduate school, as the extra years pile on the costs even further.

Let me establish why this is wrong in the first place. It’s easy to suggest that colleges should feel free to charge however much money they want for students in order to turn a profit; this is the free-market, so they should be able to function the same way as a business, right? Nope, not even close. You see, this would only be true if education were a privilege and not a right, and if less-costly yet equally as academically honorable institutions existed across the nation. None of these cases are true. To address the latter, we all know the big name schools across the country: Rice, Caltech, Berkeley, New York, Boston, Chapel Hill, Chicago, the Ivy League, etc. Not only are all of these schools highly expensive for most students and significantly difficult to get into, but many are concentrated on the eastern or western portions of the United States. Meanwhile, there are a good lot of students in the Midwestern states that would have to travel halfway across the country to attend a highly competitive school, let alone afford the costs associated with such travel. Therefore no, there are not enough competitive and affordable universities across the nation for colleges to charge these enormous sums.

The former point, that education is a right, is one I must elaborate more uniquely on. Education is clearly not a privilege; if it was, elementary, middle, and high schools would all charge tuition. But they don’t; all primary education is publicly funded by taxpayer dollars. True, private options exist, though comparatively few students attend these schools for results that are not always better than the public option. However, it seems our country values education as a right only up until the age of majority, because at that point a good portion of education is cut off from public funding. Even public universities still charge fairly ludicrous sums for students’ tuition, room and board. This is, frankly, both obscene and absurd. Why should education not be a right? If education is a privilege, only those with money and connections can afford higher education. This forces the poor and middle class to either abandon hope of ever getting an education and a good job, or forces them into the army so they can hope to afford college at a later date. Either way, we end up with an inevitable plutocracy in which the rich completely control the nation’s wealth, politics, and educational institutions, a wildly unstable situation that hurts the majority.

Education is a right, up to and through tertiary education; why should people be forcibly restricted from pursuing their dreams by wealth? If education is a right, then it should therefore be publicly funded in absolutely all cases; this means that even private universities should be willing to give in to public funding, and public funding needs to be increased significantly. Let’s take a look at nations in the European Union, which value education as a right in full. Most students in these nations either pay tuition close to just 1,000 dollars, or none at all in several cases. Imagine that, paying nothing for college and still getting a fairly competitive academic value out of it. Students are paying whopping loads less for their education in Europe, and they still pump out a large deal of Nobel Prize winners. The E.U. is still holding onto a very high standard of living and median wages, and has a very highly educated population in most every member state. I’m sure you can see the disparity, and the comparatively easy solution to the crisis. Simply make college a public institution, charge more on taxes, and make the costs of higher education much lower much quicker for students from all economic groups. It pays off in the long run to not have our incoming work-seekers laden with debt immediately.

That concludes my piece this week, and I hope I’ve provided all the information necessary to bolster my argument. I am always open for response here in the comments section, or on my email at zerospintop@live.com. As always, I can be contacted through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Steam, and DeviantArt. I have also recently opened myself a Tumblr account by the name of KnoFear through which I can be contacted; I will likely be posting links to my work there as well. Good night, and this is KnoFear, signing off.

Utmost Respect: Opposition to Vegetarianism

Greetings all!

This post comes delayed from its original set date mostly due to school work again, and for that I apologize. I've also been playing around with the style of this blog and its format, and have been considering some possible changes to make the site more visually appealing and navigable. However, I did intend to write this out before, so it does need to be said. I am not a vegetarian, nor do I think I ever will be. I also oppose vegetarianism on various grounds. For some reason, this seems to be an "oddity," for a leftist to not be or at least support vegetarianism. But here, I intend to explain why, and likely gain the ire of my fellow leftist colleagues along the way. But I'm willing to take those blows for now.

First, I must qualify my argument. I do not absolutely oppose all vegetarianism. If you are not eating meat strictly for religious reasons (if you are, say, Hindu) then I do accept that and would not argue against such a practice. If vegetarianism is somehow a part of your culture or traditions, I will not keep you from practicing vegetarianism in that case either. In fact, I'd be very much interested in learning about such a culture that I have not heard of before. I also am in favor of bettering our treatment towards animals, specifically those which we eat most like chickens and cows. We should not line chickens up in cages and give them hormones and do all sorts of horrible and immoral things in order to gain profit or create a more "appealing" product. I also believe we should not excessively hunt any animals, and that hunting should be primarily for sustenance rather than for sport. If you kill a deer in the woods, you should eat it, whether you very much want to or not. You should also be using as much of the dead body as you can; waste not want not, and all that jazz. We should not be killing endangered animals as well.

However, if you are simply vegetarian because you don't want animals dying so you can eat, I don't condone that. Let's start with the facts, shall we?

Animals have populations in the wild which are hopefully in a stable size. In order for such a stable size to be maintained, there must be a food source which also must remain stable. There must be a birth rate which combats the rate of death and predation, but does not cause excessive growth of that animal's population. However, human intervention or the lack thereof in certain animal populations can very drastically help or harm said population, and this cannot be avoided due to the extreme amount of space which humans have occupied at this point in history. Take, for example, the deer population around Maryland. Here, there are so many deer it often seems ridiculous, and they have become monstrously overpopulated. On the surface, it sounds like a good thing for an animal's population to be high and rising, but the opposite is true. Overpopulation often leads to severe competition among a species for resources, leaving many animals to starve and die in horrid conditions. There are many of these animals starving and suffering because of this overpopulation. 

Now let's say that we stop eating cows and chickens. These populations are already enormous due to our breeding of them, and so removing them from our diets would also end the only source of predation for both of these groups. We would instantly see overpopulation and starvation, making the quick deaths we see on the farm seem gentle compared to the suffering a starving cow will go through for days on end before it dies. This provides us with a good reason for not cutting meat out of our diets quickly; by doing so, we would be doing the animals we are trying to help a huge disservice, and would thereby be treating them even more poorly than we currently do. If we ever had to absolutely cut out meat from our diets, it would likely take a very long time and would not be a very cost effective process, and would also be met with fiery resistance. All in all, the effort put into saving these animals would not be worth our time and would likely endanger their populations in the process. Animal populations follow a graph very similar to an economy; if the population retains a steady process of growth and death, it will remain safe. However, if the population explodes in growth too quickly, it will crash and burn in a very unhealthy fashion.

Now, in the case of hunting animals, some things are quite different. Hunting for deer is not quite as widespread as is the butchering of cows, so I have to treat the situation differently. I'll be taking deer hunting in Maryland as my example once more. As I stated earlier, the deer population in Maryland is simply enormous for the state's relatively small size, and as such a set of hunting regulations are in place for hunting these deer. As one can see, there is no limit to exactly how many deer may be taken per day, as long as they are in season and the hunting occurs during permitted hours. The main reason why Maryland has so many deer is because the state used to regulate hunting more strictly, and eventually the deer population exploded years ago. As such, these regulations were dropped in order to better control the population and prevent the rampant spread of disease among the deer. However, there are simply not enough hunters to bring the deer population down to its original levels, and while starvation among the deer has been mostly conquered through hunting, I doubt that it doesn't happen anymore. I'm sure you can see my point by now, in that hunting can prevent populations of certain animals which are prone to excessive growth from exploding and damaging the species as a whole. While hunting may not be the entire solution to such problems, it is an important part of it. And lastly, to hunt these animals and then not eat them would be entirely wasteful; plus, there would be far more deer corpses for people to deal with. 

And now, we come to the secondary portion of my argument, which is more grounded in my political leanings and my treatment of other cultures. Being vegetarian, at least in a first-world country simply because you don't want to hurt animals, is a very privileged thing to do. Let me explain. In many parts of the world, like the Amazon Basin for example, meat is very much a part of the culture that has not changed for a long part of history. Let's say you, a vegetarian, decides to visit said region and are offered a meal which contains meat by your Brazilian hosts. If you deny the offering on the basis of "I don't eat meat," well that is frankly like slapping your hosts in the face. Not only are you turning down their generosity without a good explanation from their point of view, but you are also essentially telling them that their culture is a barbaric one and you are superior to them.

"But what if I never go to a place where meat is the culture?" I'm sure some of you are asking that. You might not be insulting people straight to their faces, but you are still indirectly making a mockery of how many people choose to live their lives. You are also making a mockery of how many people are forced to live their lives. In many countries, meat in the diet is not just a part of the culture, but it is a necessity. It is often the case that without meat, significant portions of the human population could not survive or prosper at all. I am certain that a starving man will not turn down a burger because it is "cruel" or "immoral." He will scarf it down hungrily, and thank you with all of his heart. Do you know why? Because that man does not have the privilege of choice in his diet, and therein lies my most direct qualm with vegetarianism. Choosing to cut meat from your diet, choosing to say "I can do this, so I will," is a very improper thing to do that can be seen as very insulting. Most vegetarians and vegans live in countries where the ability to cut meat out of your diet is easy. America, for example, is a fairly rich country with tons of food options beyond meat that won't cost much. It is comparatively easy to be a vegetarian here than, say, in Ethiopia. Just because you can be a vegetarian without drastically changing your life, does not mean you should. And just because you provide a righteous justification for your means, those means do not justify your ends. By becoming a vegetarian or vegan, you are shoving your lifestyle into the face of others and declaring it to be the superior way of life. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not be looked upon with severe ire by many of my fellows.

That is all for this two-part post, and I hope I've made my explanation concise for all of you. Once again, I encourage comments here to provide feedback for me. I am available through my email at zerospintop@live.com, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, DeviantArt, and Steam. Good night, and this is KnoFear, signing off.